Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 05_ Agents of Chaos 02_ Jedi Eclipse - James Luceno [33]
“In the fields,” Gaph said.
R’vanna nodded. “Except that very few manage to earn enough to purchase onward passage. Most of the camp’s earliest arrivals have been forced into indentured servitude, here on Ruan or on other Salliche-administered worlds, and rumors persist that those who refuse Salliche’s benevolence often disappear.”
“But it makes no sense,” Melisma said. “Sentients will never replace droids as workers. Sentients need more than the occasional oil bath and data upgrades. Not to mention that production would be drastically reduced.”
R’vanna showed her a patient smile. “I said as much to a Salliche representative who visited Ryn City only last week. And do you know what he told me? That the hiring of sentients not only eases the refugee problem but allows the company to advertise its products as retaining ‘handpicked freshness.’ ”
Gaph mulled it over for a moment. “So our options, for the moment, are either to go to work for Salliche Ag or remain mired here.”
Melisma glanced around the courtyard, and at the masterfully built dormitories and kitchens. “How have you managed to do so well? Walking through the camp, I was afraid we were going to be attacked and killed. If folks could find a way, I’m sure they’d hold us accountable for the Yuuzhan Vong invasion.”
R’vanna smiled sadly. “Life has always been thus for the Ryn. But not everyone fears or distrusts us. It’s thanks to those few that we’ve done so well.”
“Charity?”
“Bite your tongue, child,” Gaph said theatrically. “The Ryn do not accept charity. We work for all we get.”
Melisma looked at R’vanna. “What sort of work can we do here?”
“The sort we’re best at: apprising people of their options, allowing them to see the error of their ways, providing them with helpful tips to see them through the complexities of daily life.”
“Telling fortunes,” Melisma said, mildly disdainful. “Reading sabacc cards.”
Gaph was grinning broadly. “Singing, dancing, the rewards that come to those who dispense good advice … Life could be worse, child. Life could be much worse.”
“Aren’t you the one who said that help had arrived?” the red-maned Ryn named Sapha asked Wurth Skidder aboard the slave ship Crèche.
“I might have said something to that effect,” the Jedi was willing to concede. “Heat of the moment, and all that.”
Roa regarded Skidder with interest, then glanced past him at Sapha. “When was this?”
“On Gyndine,” she told him, “when he rushed to be captured by the multilegged creature that was herding us together. He said, ‘Take heart, help has arrived.’ ”
Roa looked at Skidder once more. “He rushed?”
Sapha shrugged. “It looked that way from where I stood.”
Side by side, the three of them were standing to their waists in the viscous sorrel-colored nutrient in which the young yammosk marinated, like an excised brain in an autopsy pan. The cloying odor—like garlic roses bathed in nlora perfume—had taken some getting used to, but by now almost all the captives were beyond the retching stage, though a male Sullustan had fainted moments earlier and had had to be carried out.
One of the more gracile of the creature’s manifold tentacles floated in front of Skidder and his comrades, and their hands were busy massaging and caressing it, the way the Bimms did with certain breeds of nerf to assure steaks of extraordinary tenderness. Roa’s worrisomely wan pal, Fasgo, and two Ryn were doing the same to the other side of the tentacle. The arrangement of six to a tentacle was repeated throughout the circular basin, except at the yammosk’s shorter, thicker members, where two or three captives sufficed.
“He rushed,” Roa said, more to himself this time; then he fixed Skidder with a gimlet stare. “Sapha almost makes it sound like you wanted to be captured, Keyn.”
“To wind up here?” Skidder said. “A guy would have to be either deranged or dauntless.”
Smile lines formed